untsmen,
disregarded by all, and I have been even grieved for the bearer of so
futile and melancholy an existence. The last Merovingians may have
looked not otherwise.

The Princess Amalia Seraphina, a daughter of the Grand-Ducal house of
Toggenburg-Tannhaeuser, would be equally inconsiderable if she were not a
cutting instrument in the hands of an ambitious man. She is much younger
than the Prince, a girl of two-and-twenty, sick with vanity,
superficially clever, and fundamentally a fool. She has a red-brown
rolling eye, too large for her face, and with sparks of both levity and
ferocity; her forehead is high and narrow, her figure thin and a little
stooping. Her manners, her conversation, which she interlards with
French, her very tastes and ambitions, are alike assumed, and the
assumption is ungracefully apparent: Hoyden playing Cleopatra. I should
judge her to be incapable of truth. In private life a girl of this
description embroils the peace of families, walks attended by a troop of
scowling swains, and passes, once at least, through the divorce court;
it is a common and, except to the cynic, an uninteresting type. On the
throne, however, and in the hands of a man like Gondremark, she may
become the authoress of serious public evils.

Gondremark, the true ruler of this unfortunate country, is a more
complex study. His position in Gruenewald, to which he is a foreigner, is
eminently false; and that he should maintain it as he does, a very
miracle of impudence and dexterity. His speech, his face, his policy,
are all double: heads and tails. Which of the two extremes may be his
actual design he were a bold man who should offer to decide. Yet I will
hazard the guess that he follows both experimentally, and awaits, at the
hand of destiny, one of those directing hints of which she is so lavish
to the wise.

On the one hand, as _Maire du Palais_ to the incompetent Otto, and using
the love-sick Princess for a tool and mouthpiece, he pursues a policy of
arbitrary power and territorial aggrandisement. He has called out the
whole capable male population of the state to military service; he has
bought cannon; he has tempted away promising officers from foreign
armies; and he now begins, in his international relations, to assume the
swaggering port and the vague threatful language of a bully. The idea of
extending Gruenewald may appear absurd, but the little state is
advantageously placed, its neighbours are all defenceless